July 26, 2013 AT 8:30 pm

Community Corner: Projects Loaded with Adafruit Goodies, and Other Spectaculars from the Past Week in Adafruit’s Community

Featured Adafruit Community Project

Check out this Raspberry Pi loaded with Adafruit goodies from zielonarodzina on twitter:

Really struggling to fit any more Adafruit projects into my RPi…

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 56,621 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

jon sanford shared: “…hacking eyeglass correction to the new video goggles AdaFruit introduced here. I also show how to get closeups with the camera built in to my MAC. What is shown here is an old 35mm camera lens with some elements removed repurposed as a close up lens. The adapter is made of cardboard tape paper & paste then painted. Just cut & fit.” (read more)

Heather Solvers shared: “Happy robot cupid is Happy. Recently revamped robot cupid I created last year, new paint and a new pair of legs. Will put up for adoption soon.”
(read more)

Piszok Alfréd shared: “About 5 years ago I needed to wear glasses and I was therefore very disappointed and upset. Just to read the tiny display of a digital clock in the night without glasses became impossible for me. Therefore I decided to do something against this situation.” (read more)

chris frost shared: “Its ready! Real good. A nice ale with sort of smokey vanilla and a citrus finish. Reminds me of steel reserve. + blue moon. I cant wait to make moRe. Its cloudy because it wasn’t filtered before bottling, will be doing that next time.” (read more)

John Mink shared: “Got tired of buying AC to USB chargers so I’m making the last USB charger I’ll ever need! I got a PC style PSU and wired it up to a few USB ports! Ok, one port for now– but it’s easily expandable! It’ll be 4 as soon as I finish using that HUB & the PSU has 14A already available at 5V (and that’s without stepping-down the 20A at 12V) Anyway, I’m done buying USB charging ports now, I can essentially charge everything off of that, and i’ve got (more than) a few “standard” chargers for around the house or traveling. Future plans is to add more USB ports, and maybe some current sensing so I have an idea how much current is being used in total. Maybe per port, but that seems like it’d get expensive.” (read more)

Jaidyn Edwards shared: “Recently a lot of my younger viewers have asked me how they should go about making their first robot. In this video I talk through and show the steps I use to take me from an idea, to a working robot.” (read more)

Gert Galjoen shared: “In the search for taking control on the filament optical tracking I found my device: “USB 1200DPI Wired Optical Finger Mouse”.
Lucky me as it also connects old-school PS/2 modus = easy µP connection!
This is how it looks on the inside….” (read more)

Matthew Dockrey shared: “I’ve been working on a set of script for generating gear and sprocket profiles in Inkscape for laser cutting purposes. These are highly configurable and (unlike the stock Inkscape gear script) geometrically accurate. I’ve been using both in more and more projects, so I thought it was past time there was a good way to make the profiles. Available on here on Github.” (read more)

Jeremy Milo shared: “Swords into plowshares I had a fun time building a backyard firepit inspired by the salvaged tail section of a British 1000lb Mark I bomb from the WW2 era. You can check out the original salvaged part and the construction process in these photos.” (read more)

Enes ÇALDIR shared: “Here is a robot that I designed and produced. It is called ‘MECH Rover’ Designed with SolidWorks and produced with CNC Lazer and Milling machines. It has Arduino UNO R3 and a Motor Shield with a Ping sensor. If you like it i have couple of more robots like that, that i can share with you. And I can post videos.” (read more)

Matthew W shared: “I’m naming my projects now. Meet Frank, with Helga in the background. I’ve already built two different Arduino projects before but this is my first “conventional” robot, something that people would better associate with the word “robot”. I’m excited. He still has yet to learn anything.” (read more)

Bryan Wright shared: “Partially completed 3D print. Going to sand the edges and then hot glue into position. I need to remove the raft in the middle component. See how I go.” (read more)

Laura Blankenship shared: “Wanted to share photos from my Cat Tracker project. I’m almost ready to put it on the cat. Just have to make a pocket for the batteries.” (read more)

Thomas Amely shared a project he made from Adafruit gear: “Got bored… built a solar cell phone charger with stuff I had laying around…got bored again so I decided to see if it would power an Arduino micro… it did got bored again so I decided to add an LCD, worked great. I did the math and due to the inefficiencies of the 7805 I probably won’t get much more than ~250mA at best from this so now I’m bored again. This also indicate that while my phone does say it’s charging it’s charging at a painfully slow rate. And yes I am using a 7805, it sucks but like I said it’s what I had laying around so mehh. I may order a RECOM DC-DC converter, they have efficiency rates upwards of 91% vs the 7805’s 40%. The 7805’s double as space heaters…” (read more)

Alan Jones shared: “…just guessing at how I’d hook it all together from lots of googling and whatnot. Any pointers on where I’ve gone wrong (or any bits that are right) would be awesome. BTW, the goal of this project is to build a based for those bubbles suspended in glass 3d prints which pumps a lot of light in around the base to make the bubble shape inside glow.” A number of community members chimed in to help him set out in the right direction — and he has been sharing updates as he learns more. (read more)

Curtis Swartley shared: “I spent all day making a motion activated cat toy for my cat… She just looked at if for like 10 seconds and walked away. Go figure!” (read more)

Mano Biletsky shared: “Replacing the old protoboard with a new setup. This one is adjustable per channel and has protection for feedback from other channels. Hope this works…. The flexsensors you see (still on the old board) are the ones that are donated by Sensor Products Inc (SPI) in Madison, NJ.” (read more)

craig I shared: “Needle felted in merino wool and formed freehand from a book I picked up. The inner core is couch pillow stuffing(gotta recycle right?) The eyes are buttons inside a clear acrylic “button” Im very happy with this 1st attempt at needle felting.” (read more)

brad tee shared: “Finally getting my head around this thing. Got the beaglebone Black working with the HC-05 bluetooth module today. Until I can get the wifi working, this will be how I control my next project. After finally getting the ethernet working, I have finished the first steps of learning this new device. I got the BBB working with the HC-05 bluetooth module. For now I’m just talking back and forth through a terminal, and using Python on the BBB end. This is a pain to get started on, but once it works, it is so much cleaner than with arduino. Since everything is 3.3v, you don’t need any voltage dividers.” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared a water bottle “tripod”: “Water Bottle “Tripod” — camera-on-water-bottleAlthough possibly better described as a monopod, this is one of the easiest to make camera mounts that you will find here. This Instructables article outlines how to make it, but to summarize: Get 1/4 – 20 bolt and nut, poke hole in water bottle cap, attach bolt securely. The camera can then be screwed into the bolt.” (read more)

Jay Doscher shared: “Here’s a shot of my solar tracking robot, including my temporary power supply. You can see the +Adafruit Industries ultimate gps unit. The code is finally stable, working on fine-tuning the accuracy of the robot before doing two key things- sending out for professionally milled parts and publishing the project & code!” (read more)

Ben Krasnow shared about “Optical finish for acrylic — vapor polishing and other techniques”: “I needed to polish two acrylic lenses that were made on a CNC lathe to the best possible finish (hopefully, optical quality). I made some test coupons and tried three different polishing techniques on three different surfaces to see which combination of techniques would yield the best results. The winner was clearly 2000 grit sandpaper followed by Novus No.2 polish.” (read more)

Caleb Charland shared a 14-hour exposure that shows the light generated by a single LED inserted inside an orange. The chemical reaction between the nails and the citrus fruit surrounding them powers the warm glow of the photo. (read more)

The Cocktail Robotics Division at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories shared: “While we are better known for other types of art robots (like the Eggbot and now the WaterColorBot), we have also been involved with cocktail robotics for the past few years. After a half-dozen cocktail robotics event over the past couple of years, we’ve had a chance to refit our famous bar-bot, Drink Making Unit 2.0, with a few well-earned upgrades. Read on for the gory details!” (read more)

UC Berkeley researchers: “have created the first electronic skin that is truly interactive. Not only can the thin, flexible plastic sense pressure, organic LEDs embedded in the material light up when touched.” Wow! (read more)

BitCave shared RipenINO – Arduino-controlled home-brew cheese maker: “BitCave is a project focused on local and homemade cheese production created by Guido Cortese, a technician based in Italy who likes bees and plein air. After self-producing beer and bread, it’s now possible to experiment with cheese making. If you don’t have a cellar or basement to age cheese, you can reproduce the optimal conditions to let raw cheese ripen by adjusting seasonal parameters with the help of Arduino. The parameters of temperature and humidity are governed by ripenINO, the brain of BitCave. The airflow is constantly cooled and humidified through the cell, and is corrected in case of microclimatic variations depending on the program you choose.” (read more)

Mens Amplio share about their Pi-powered LED-lit brain sculpture controlled by EEG waves: “A person wears a NeuroSky MindWave EEG headset which reads that person’s brainwaves. The EEG communicates with a Raspberry Pi, which will be programmed with software written in Python, and which will in turn talk to the LEDs using a protocol called Open Pixel Control (OPC). The OPC client will send out LED color data packets to the LED strips over Serial Peripheral Interface Bus (SPI), an information transmission protocol that is enabled by default on the Linux distro Mens Amplio is running on their Raspberry Pis.” (read more)

Ken Shirriff shows how to get more out of your Rigol oscilloscope: “A Rigol oscilloscope has a USB output, allowing you to control it with a computer and perform additional processing externally. I was inspired by Cibo Mahto’s article Controlling a Rigol oscilloscope using Linux and Python, and came up with some new Python oscilloscope hacks: super-zoomable graphs, generating a spectrogram, analyzing an IR signal, and dumping an oscilloscope trace as a WAV file. The key techniques I illustrate are connecting to the oscilloscope with Windows, accessing a megabyte of data with Long Memory, and performing analysis on the data.” (read more)

Casy Kovach shared his Nightmare’s Soul Edge project: “This cosplay created by Casy Kovach will premier at Dragon*Con 2013 in Atlanta. Soul Edge is the weapon of Nightmare from the Soul Calibur series. This particular version is from Soul Calibur 5.” Great build! (read more)

Brian Benchoff shared how to build a new VT100 power supply: “A while back I found one of these – a VT100 serial terminal from 1979 – on eBay for cheap. $40 and a whole lot of waiting later, I had it on my desk. I turned it on, and… nothing. I expected this. The auction said it didn’t work. After tearing it apart and seeing what *could* be wrong, I found the switching transistor (yes, this thing actually used a switching power supply in 1979. It’s a really well engineered piece of equipment) was dead. If anyone knows where I can get an IR 92-O350 transistor – it looks exactly like this– drop me a line. Instead of rebuilding the power supply with incredibly difficult to find parts, I found this tutorial for improvising a VT100 power supply with a normal, off the shelf ATX computer power supply. The circuit is fairly simple, although the non-volatile RAM in the VT100 requires -23 Volts. No big deal, just make a crappy linear supply for that.” (read more)

Avery “Tequals0″ shared some great pictures of electrophoresis gels, a difficult thing to photograph! “Have you ever struggled to take a picture of a gel? Probably not if you dropped a couple k on a gel documentation system. But for those of us who to take photos of gels and keep our money, you might look like this (above). In this photo, I am trying to hold my gel illumination (a couple of LEDS) in one hand, and hold my amber filter, focus, and take a picture with my other hand. In low light, my phone camera can’t focus either! Thankfully, my camera can take voice commands, so I did manage to take a picture. I have a Samsung galaxy note II, (at the time of writing, this is a recently released, top of the line phone) which has a fixed aperture and TINY sensor.” (read more)

Travis Goodspeed shared about “Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites”: “In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking moving targets and looking for downlink channels.” (read more)

Daniel Amesberger shared an update on a DIY pick and place machine he is building on the Adafruit Forums: “I thought I’ll post some infos on a DIY pick and place machine I am building. Maybe someone finds the infos useful” (read more)

Adafruit community members shared with us about Shinsuke Yamaji‘s project: “Designer and owner of vinyl cutting Autora Factory Plate has devised an innovative method for cutting graphics onto analog vinyl, translating the result into master sounds. Through programmed lines and illustrations, the system produces accurate audio from a unique smartphone application by Koji Kimura. Users can cut squares or spirals onto records, or draw with sine waves and sound data files, maintaining the sound quality of the original track.” (read more)

Jerusalum-based industrial designer antonina shared: how to turn a washing machine in to a chair, complete with step by step instructions: “‘I used to be a washing machine’ is made from the common household appliance. the raw materials offer a variety of possibilities for creation and innovative design. after disassembling the necessary pieces, the manual will guide you to build a series of chairs able to be incorporated into any domestic space. simply do it yourself!” (read more)

Filipe Munhoz shared this Arduino project on the Adafruit Forums for using an iPad controller to turn a lamp on and off: “I would like to share my first project. I am using arduíno + relay and a java webapplication deployed on apache. This test I used my local IP but If I configure my router I can turn the light on/off anywhere!” (read more)

techagekids shared a write up on “Making a Lemon Battery and How Does it Work?” and featured Circuit Playground! “The lemon battery is one of the most popular science experiments for kids. It features in Episode 2: B is for Battery of Circuit Playground by LadyAda from AdaFruit Industries. When my kids watched this episode they of course wanted to make a lemon battery. It’s a quick and fun experiment to do and kids can get really involved with it. When their cousin visited we had fun doing the experiment. We used a mixture of lemons and limes – any acidic citrus fruit will work nicely…” (read more)

Last week’s Electronics Show & Tell: “Show and Tell 7/20/2013 – iBeacon reversed engineered, 42 wearable LED pendant and “annoy” bot! – Electronics show and tell with G+ On-Air hangouts every Saturday at 9:30pm ET. Want to show a project on an upcoming show and tell? Leave a comment on the show and tell announcement on Adafruit’s G+ page!” (read more)